Firebird : a memoir

Though five volumes of poetry and his award-winning memoir, Heaven's Coast, Mark Doty has produced one of the most important bodies of work in contemporary literature. In his powerful new autobiography, Firebird, Doty tells the story of a ten-year-old in a top hat, cane, and red chiffon scarf, interrupted while belting out Judy Garland's "Get Happy" by his alarmed mother at the bedroom door, exclaiming, "Son, you're a boy!" A self-confessed "chubby smart bookish sissy with glasses and a Southern accent," Mark Doty grew up on the move, the family following his father's engineering work across America--from Memphis to Tucson, Florida to California. With Doty's rebellious sister already heading down a road that will bring her more than the usual share of teenage troubles, and his parents bedazzled by their own isolate disappointments, Firebird presents us with a heroic little boy who has quite enough worries without discovering that his dawning sexuality is The Wrong One. Attracted not to baseball gloves or space travel but to textiles and opera, horror movies and free-form dance, he finds that his confusion and fear are shared by those around him as he tries to make his way into the world to the sound of Petula Clark singing "Downtown." A heartbreaking comedy of one family's dissolution through the corrosive powers of alcohol, sorrow, and thwarted desire, Firebird is also a wry evocation of childhood's pleasures and terrors, and a comic tour of suburban American life in the fifties and sixties. Lyrical and shattering at once, alive with vivid characters and a beauty of language and detail that are the hallmarks of Doty's miraculous prose, Firebird is unsparingly truthful and compassionate, a testament to how it is possible to save oneself through the transformative power of art.

In Firebird, Mark Doty tells the story of a ten-year-old in a top hat, cane, and red chiffon scarf, interrupted while belting out Judy Garland's "Get Happy" by his alarmed mother at the bedroom door, exclaiming, "Son, you're a boy!"

Firebird presents us with a heroic little boy who has quite enough worries without discovering that his dawning sexuality is the Wrong One. A self-confessed "chubby smart bookish sissy with glasses and a Southern accent," Doty grew up on the move, the family following his father's engineering work across America-from Tennessee to Arizona, Florida to California. A lyrical, heartbreaking comedy of one family's dissolution through the corrosive powers of alcohol, sorrow, and thwarted desire, Firebird is also a wry evocation of childhood's pleasures and terrors, a comic tour of American suburban life, and a testament to the transformative power of art.

Salon - Jaime Manrique

Adversity, which can destroy people, often fertilizes the ground for artists. It has certainly done that for Mark Doty. His first two volumes of poetry, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight (1987) and Turtle, Swan (1991), introduced us to a promising poet. In his third volume, My Alexandria (1993), Doty -- responding to the dreadful losses of the AIDS epidemic -- had breakthroughs both in range and in artistic maturity. In that collection, the poem "With Animals," a relentless lament on the need of all creatures to cling to life even under the most horrifying circumstances (and surely one of the finest poems written in our time), demonstrated the poet's flair for dramatic narrative; it wasn't hard to imagine him eventually trying his hand at fiction or memoir.

Since My Alexandria, Doty has published two books of poems that are increasingly masterful in formal terms yet are overly preoccupied with word stitchery and are often lacking in a sense of urgency. Recently he has been stronger as a memoirist. In 1996, he published Heaven's Coast, a much-acclaimed account of the death of his lover from AIDS. With Firebird, his new memoir, he has written his most satisfying book.

Firebird tells two overlapping stories. The first is a fairly conventional portrait of the artist as a young man, with the added twist that Doty had to come to terms with his homosexuality at a time when there were few role models and when attitudes were more hostile than they are today. I warmed slowly to this part of the story, since his narrative of his early life in Tennessee, teeming though it is with telling and lovely details about the South, is territory that Truman Capote, Harper Lee, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers have covered much more successfully. Doty writes at considerable length about things that would have been better dealt with at a glance.

Firebird comes into sharper focus after Mark and his parents move to Tucson, Ariz. His older sister, Sally, gets married and stays behind. Later she makes a memorable re-entrance as a divorcee and ex-convict who turns tricks to make a buck. Doty's lyrical re-creation of the Southwest's parched landscape is one of the book's enormous pleasures: The city of Tucson, with its creosote-scented twilights, dry arroyos and dust storms, becomes another character.

It is in Tucson that the unforgettable story of the author's mother, which forms the core of the memoir, begins to emerge. A woman with an artistic temperament, Ruth Doty signs up for painting and watercolor lessons and flourishes with new friends who share her interests. But her husband, who works on building projects for the government, can't stand still; the family moves frequently (to Florida, to California, back to Tucson) because he keeps getting into trouble with his supervisors. As Mark grows older, wrestles with his sexuality and explores the world of art -- dance, music, painting, crafts and, later, poetry -- a kind of rigor mortis sets in to his parents' marriage, and his mother's drinking problem escalates until she loses her sanity. Ruth's Gothic behavior brings to mind Blanche DuBois' plunge into madness in A Streetcar Named Desire and Mary Tyrone's drug-ravaged dementia in Long Day's Journey Into Night. The harrowing last chapters of Firebird, leading to the final deracinated days when Ruth lies dying of cirrhosis in a hospital ward, are painful to read, yet they are rendered without any trace of sentimentality or self-indulgence.

In these pages, Doty's writing surpasses anything he's ever attempted before and achieves a depth and a clear-eyed splendor that left me bereft and exalted at the same time. What had begun as an oft-told story becomes an authentic tragedy. It's been a while since a book has moved me so, or since a book's appalling beauty has brought to mind the power of great writing to make us feel as if (to paraphrase Emily Dickinson) the top of our head had been taken off. In Firebird, Mark Doty has elevated the story of his troubled family to the stature of myth, and in the process he has written an American classic.

The year is 1989 and Mark Doty's life has reached a state of enviable equilibrium. His reputation as a poet of formidable talent is growing, he enjoys his work as a college professor and, perhaps most importantly, he is deeply in love with his partner of many years, Wally Roberts. The harmonious existence these two men share is shattered, however, when they learn that Wally has tested positive for the HIV virus.

From diagnosis to the initial signs of deterioration to the heartbreaking hour when Wally is released from his body's ruined vessel, Heaven's Coastis an intimate chronicle of love, its hardships, and its innumerable gifts. We witness Doty's passage through the deepest phase of grief — letting his lover go while keeping him firmly alive in memory and heart — and, eventually beyond, to the slow reawakening of the possibilities of pleasure. Part memoir, part journal, part elegy for a life of rare communication and beauty, Heaven's Coast evinces the same stunning honesty, resplendent descriptive power and rapt attention to the physical landscape that has won Doty's poetry such attention and acclaim.

The Advocate - Winston Wilde

Mark Doty's lyric recollections in his latest book, Heaven's Coast, on the dying of his lover, Wally Roberts, and on Doty's afterlife will undoubtedly be enshrined with the few other literary master relics of the gay American holocaust...

Although Doty is distinctly New England in his approach to writing, his queer sensibilities give him an American voice...His availability to the holiness of life, his balance of pragmatic skepticism and assured intuition, and his earthly drive to sniff "the scented herbage of my breast," in Walt Whitman's words, are emblematic of the grace and grit of true queer spirit.

In Firebird, Mark Doty tells the story of a ten-year-old in a top hat, cane, and red chiffon scarf, interrupted while belting out Judy Garland's "Get Happy" by his alarmed mother at the bedroom door, exclaiming, "Son, you're a boy!" A self-confessed "chubby smart bookish sissy with glasses and a Southern accent," Mark Doty grew up on the move, the family following his father's engineering work across America—from Memphis to Tucson, Florida to California. With Doty's rebellious sister already heading down a road that will bring her more than the usual share of teenage troubles, and his parents bedazzled by their own isolate disappointments, Firebird presents us with a heroic little boy who has quite enough worries without discovering that his dawning sexuality is The Wrong One. Attracted not to baseball gloves or space travel but to textiles and opera, horror movies and free-form dance, he finds that his confusion and fear are shared by those around him as he tries to make his way into the world to the sound of Petula Clark singing "Downtown." A heartbreaking comedy of one family's dissolution through the corrosive powers of alcohol, sorrow, and thwarted desire, Firebird is also a wry evocation of childhood's pleasures and terrors, and a comic tour of suburban American life in the fifties and sixties. Lyrical and shattering at once, alive with vivid characters and a beauty of language and detail that are the hallmarks of Doty's miraculous prose, Firebird is unsparingly truthful and compassionate, a testament to how it is possible to save oneself through the transformative power of art. The year is 1989 and Mark Doty's life has reached a state of enviable equilibrium. His reputation as a poet of formidable talent is growing, he enjoys his work as a college professor and, perhaps most importantly, he is deeply in love with his partner of many years, Wally Roberts. The harmonious existence these two men share is shattered, however, when they learn that Wally has tested positive for the HIV virus. From diagnosis to the initial signs of deterioration to the heartbreaking hour when Wally is released from his body's ruined vessel, Heaven's Coast is an intimate chronicle of love, its hardships, and its innumerable gifts. We witness Doty's passage through the deepest phase of grief -- letting his lover go while keeping him firmly alive in memory and heart -- and, eventually beyond, to the slow reawakening of the possibilities of pleasure. Part memoir, part journal, part elegy for a life of rare communication and beauty, Heaven's Coast evinces the same stunning honesty, resplendent descriptive power and rapt attention to the physical landscape that has won Doty's poetry such attention and acclaim. "A self-confessed "chubby smart bookish sissy with glasses and a Southern accent," Mark Doty grew up on the move, the family following his father's engineering work across America - from Memphis to Tucson, Florida to California. With Doty's rebellious sister already heading down a road that will bring her more than the usual share of teenage troubles, and his parents bedazzled by their own isolate disappointments, Firebird presents us with a heroic little boy who has quite enough worries without discovering that his dawning sexuality is The Wrong One. Attracted not to baseball gloves or space travel but to textiles and opera, horror movies and free-form dance, he finds that his confusion and fear are shared by those around him as he tries to make his way into the world to the sound of Petula Clark singing "Downtown.""--BOOK JACKET. "A heartbreaking comedy of one family's dissolution through the corrosive powers of alcohol, sorrow, and thwarted desire, Firebird is also a wry evocation of childhood's pleasures and terrors, and a comic tour of suburban American life in the fifties and sixties."--BOOK JACKET. "A beautifully written, hallucinatorily evocative memoir of growing up gay in baby-boom America." Newsweek In his powerful autobiography, Firebird, Mark Doty tells the story of a ten-year-old in a top hat, cane, and red chiffon scarf, interrupted while belting out Judy Garland's "Get Happy" by his alarmed mother at the bedroom door, exclaiming, "Son, you're a boy!" Firebird presents us with a heroic little boy who has quite enough worries without discovering that his dawning sexuality is the Wrong One. A self-confessed "chubby smart bookish sissy with glasses and a Southern accent," Doty grew up on the move, the family following his father's engineering work across America-from Tennessee to Arizona, Florida to California. A lyrical, heartbreaking comedy of one family's dissolution through the corrosive powers of alcohol, sorrow, and thwarted desire, Firebird is also a wry evocation of childhood's pleasures and terrors, a comic tour of American suburban life, and a testament to the transformative power of art. In his latest collection, Atlantis, Doty claims the mythical lost island as his own: a fading paradise whose memory he must keep alive at the same time that he is forced to renounce its hold on him. Atlantis recedes, just as the lives of those Doty loves continue to be extinguished by the devastation of AIDS. Set in the harbor village of Provincetown, whose charming, cluttered landscape Doty brings to life, the collection chronicles the illness and death of Doty's beloved partner, as well as many others whose worlds have been both ravaged and broadened by this disease. Doty's struggle is to reconcile with, and even to celebrate, the evanescence of our earthly connections - to those we love, to the shifting physical landscape, even to our strongest feelings - and to understand how we can love more at the very moment that we must consent to let go.

Mark Doty's last two award-winning collections of poetry, as well as his acclaimed memoir Heaven's Coast, used the devastation of AIDS as a lens through which to consider questions of loss, love and identity. The poems in his new collection, Sweet Machine, see the world from a new, hard-won perspective: A coming back to life, after so much death, a way of seeing the body's "sweet machine" not simply as a time bomb, but also as a vibrant, sensual, living thing. These poems are themselves "sweet machines"—lyrical, exuberant and joyous—and they mark yet another milestone in the extraordinary career of one of our most distinguished and accomplished poets.

The poignant, accomplished new collection of poetry from the author of My Alexandria—1993 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Los Angeles Times Book Award, 1993 National Book Award Finalist.

Library Journal

A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for My Alexandria, Doty offers "eloquent meditations on the essential themesmortality and life, beauty and loss" (LJ 4/14/93)in poems haunted by the specter of AIDS.

A respected poet and author offers a harrowing and ultimately redemptive portrait of his childhood and adolescence, providing a glimpse of the horrors of alcoholism and a knowing, sometimes comic, view of suburban America in the 1950s and 1960s. Reprint. In this "part memoir, part journal, part elegy for a life of rare communion and beauty," the author/poet reveals the accommodations and adjustments he and his partner must make when they discover Wally is HIV-positive The poignant, accomplished new collection of poetry from the author of My Alexandria --1993 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Los Angeles Times Book Award, 1993 National Book Award Finalist. In 1959, in Memphis, Tennessee, my sister, Sally, became a Rain Girl.